


Everything I Brew, I Brew it for You

by Kangofu_CB



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Barista Clint Barton, Coffee Puns, Gift Fic, M/M, Meet-Cute, Nurse Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:07:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22039057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangofu_CB/pseuds/Kangofu_CB
Summary: It’s Christmas in the hospital, and Bucky’s going to need alotof coffee to make it through.Luckily, there’s a hot barista who knowsexactlywhat he needs working at the coffee shop downstairs.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 74
Kudos: 440
Collections: Winterhawk Wonderland





	Everything I Brew, I Brew it for You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [1000_directions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1000_directions/gifts), [happybibliosaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/happybibliosaurus/gifts).



> This work is for Winterhawk Wonderland, and is an exchange fic, obviously. I realize that it’s gifted to two people and I’d like to take a moment to explain why, because I think they both deserve an acknowledgement. 
> 
> My original recipient was happybibliosaurus, who very unfortunately had to drop out due to circumstances beyond their control. The prompts for the fic were Nurse Bucky meets Disaster Clint in the ER on Christmas, Barista Clint takes care of lonely Bucky on Christmas, and a third prompt that I’ve honestly forgot about now, but I mashed the first two together into something that didn’t meet either prompt completely, but I hope you still like it. 
> 
> In the meantime, 1000-directions spent a lot of time helping me plan and plot and talk through my ideas and just generally was her usual wonderful self, so when HBS had to drop and I no longer *needed* to provide a gift for them, I still really wanted to gift this to them, but I also felt like 1000-directions deserved something nice and lovely, especially as she pinch-hit for the exchange without expectation of receiving a gift for herself. 
> 
> So here, I’ve gifted one fic to both of you which I guess seems sort of lazy now that I’m writing it out, but I mean it very heartfelt-fully and I sincerely hope you both enjoy it <3 
> 
> Happy Holidays and thank you both for being such great people!

“Oh man, you have to work _Christmas_?” Clint says, as Bucky makes his way to the front of the longer-than-usual line at the coffee kiosk.

His hospital is big enough that they’ve got several ‘We Proudly Serve Starbucks’ coffee kiosks - he lovingly refers to them as fake-Starkbucks whenever anyone asks where he’s going - but the truth is, Bucky prefers them over real-Starbucks, and definitely this one in particular. For one thing, it’s a shorter walk, he isn’t _technically_ leaving the hospital, he doesn’t have to cross the street in whatever god forsaken weather is currently happening, and the drinks are mostly just as good even if they don’t serve a full menu.

But mostly, he prefers this barista.

The guy’s name is Clint and he’s a disaster who almost always has a bruised jaw or tape across his nose, but he’s also got a great smile _with dimples_ , and he’s frankly faster at making drinks than any real Starbucks employee Bucky has ever met. And Bucky drinks a lot of Starbucks, even when he’s not at work. He’s got enough stars on his rewards app to buy coffee for the whole unit, probably. If the hospital kiosks took the Starbucks app, which they don’t. 

“You’re working Christmas too,” Bucky points out, as the person in line in front of him steps out of the way with a muffin and a cup to self-serve his drip coffee. 

“Yeah,” Clint agrees, “but they’re paying me time and a half, and I get to see you.” He winks, provocatively over the top, as he starts foaming milk. 

Bucky ignores the exaggerated flirtatiousness of his tone, the same as he always does, because Clint seems to flirt like he breathes and Bucky’s trying not to read too much into it. Just like he ignores the silly lines Clint writes on his cups, like _You mocha me crazy_ and _I’m soy into you_ , and just like he tried not to get too worked up over the time Clint brought him back a delicately hand-painted egg from Budapest as a souvenir. It’s got a wolf curled up in abstract blue and grey lines, and it’s sitting on Bucky’s nightstand at home.

Steve hasn’t stopped giving him shit about it since it happened. But Bucky likes the little egg, even though he knows it was probably just a trinket Clint picked up in a market stall on vacation with the friend he talks about all the time - Nat - that Bucky’s half-convinced he’s in love with. The egg still makes him smile when he sees it, because it’s something he’d never have thought to buy for himself but can’t deny how perfect it is for him. 

“You want your usual?” Clint calls over the sound of the espresso machine. “Or are you having one of the holiday travesties?”

Bucky snorts. “I want the praline thing, actually.”

Clint rolls his eyes, but he’s already got a medium-sized cup under the espresso machine, and he’s hit the button for an extra shot too.

“And I’ve got six more drinks to order,” Bucky adds, carefully not looking over his shoulder at what he’s sure is an even worse line than when he’d arrived. It’s not even 8:00 in the morning yet, because Bucky’s patient assignment is today is easy enough that he’s already got free time an hour into his shift, so the line is extra long with night-shifters getting a final jolt of caffeine to head home on and recently-arrived visitors looking for the same thing to make it through the day. 

Clint blinks up at him, but he gives Bucky a knowing little smirk, and it’s Bucky’s turn to roll his eyes. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, grumbling as he pulls the slip of paper out of his pocket to read off the far-too-specific list of requests. “I’m the unit coffee bitch today,” he admits.

It gets him the laugh he’s looking for, as Clint stirs steamed milk into Bucky’s coffee. “Okay,” Clint says, sliding a sleeve over the cup and pressing it into a drink holder he’s produced when Bucky wasn’t paying attention. “Hit me.”

Bucky rattles the orders off, and Clint makes them almost as fast as Bucky can read them off, except for the skinny, nonfat, dirty chai, extra hot with a squeeze of honey and a dash of cinnamon, because Clint snorts a laugh so hard he almost drops the cup and Bucky has to repeat the order a second time. “Is this for that tiny girl on your unit?” Clint asks, as he’s squeezing honey into the cup, “the one with ten miles of hair and eyeliner that could kill a man?”

“Yeah,” Bucky grins. It’s a pretty apt description of Kate, actually, except that she could probably kill a man with everything else too. “How’d you guess?”

“She’s always down here ordering weird shit when you’re not buying her coffee for her,” Clint explains, shaking cinnamon and wedging the cup into the _second_ drink carrier. Fuck, Bucky’s arms are going to be sore when he finally makes it through two buildings and up nine floors to his unit. 

Clint drops the last drink - some kind of venti iced coffee nonsense - into the carrier and then briskly rings all seven drinks up for Bucky and swipes his employee badge. That way Bucky is easily able to pretend is not real money at all since he doesn’t see it leave his bank account and he can ignore the deduction on his paycheck. 

“See you later,” Clint calls, as he passes the drink carriers over and turns to the next customer.

“Later,” Bucky says, already contemplating how he’s going to have to use his elbow to hit the elevator buttons. As he’s turning to go Clint reaches underneath the cabinets to grab a bag of roasted coffee beans to fill the machine back up, and Bucky is hopelessly distracted by watching his biceps bulge. So distracted he nearly runs head-on into an unsuspecting visitor, which would have been both embarrassing _and_ a disaster, so Bucky ducks his head, mutters sorry, and high-tails it to the elevator bank, carefully not looking back at the coffee kiosk and hoping Clint hasn’t noticed any of it. 

He’s back on the unit before he realizes that while everyone else’s drinks have the order written on them - except Kate’s, which says “Eyeliner!!” in emphatic black grease pencil - Bucky is the only one who has a cup that says something different. 

_Bean mine_ , the cup reads, and since it’s the only other one that doesn’t have a drink description on it, that means it must be Bucky’s. Still, he leaves it to last, letting everyone else take their drinks before he reaches for it. Steve reaches for it first, even though he didn’t even _order_ anything, and eyeballs the words before handing it to Bucky with a pointed look. 

Bucky ignores him, sipping the perfectly-made drink, which isn’t even a little bit bitter despite the extra shot. 

This is why Bucky prefers Clint.

**

The next three hours pass in a bit of a blur. There’s a code on the unit that Bucky ends up pulling drugs for and running labs, and then they put an emergent ECMO in a patient which doesn’t exactly go textbook perfect and requires a CT scan afterwards. By 11:30 Bucky is lagging. Both his patients have transferred out of ICU, so he’s ‘floating’ and helping out where he can when Pepper grabs him in the hallway and basically begs him to make another coffee run.

“I quit. I’m resigning. My body literally can’t handle the stress,” she says, looking exasperated. Bucky pats her shoulder sympathetically, because this isn’t the first time he’s heard her say that, and it won’t be the last. He knows she’s not serious, she just needs to vent. Pepper loves her job - all of them do - otherwise she wouldn’t be here. “The ER just called because they want to send a 93 year old man up here for intubation, Tony Stark just blew through the unit to tell us happy Christmas, we’re doing a great job, and boy it sure is quiet up here-”

Bucky snorts. Tony Stark means well, but the CEO of the hospital hasn’t got a bit of medicine in his background, and his ability to grasp the nature of what constitutes a ‘quiet’ unit versus what is actually just well-managed chaos is a bit stilted, and the ICU is definitely in the latter category. It looks quiet because Bucky and his fellow coworkers are efficient and amazing, not because there’s nothing happening.

“-and Dr. Cho has decided that today is a _great_ day to do a triple bypass.”

“It’s Christmas!” Bucky protests, and no, he doesn’t celebrate, but it means that they’ll be calling in OR staff and paying them holiday premium, and that the hospital is on skeletal crew for all ancillary staff, so it’s not exactly the _best_ day to be performing open heart surgery.

Pepper rolls her eyes. “I _know_ ,” she says. “Which is why I need a peppermint mocha, STAT.”

Bucky snorts, but he obligingly heads down to the coffee kiosk, where Clint is busy restocking pastries and brewing more drip coffee. His head pops up over the display case with that same sideways grin that always makes Bucky think of the kind of trouble he’d like to get into. 

“Miss me already?” he asks, leaning on the edge of the case in a way that showcases his biceps in the navy blue hospital-issue polo and makes Bucky flush in remembered ogling. 

“You and the caffeine,” Bucky assures him, because he’s honest but he also doesn’t want to get _too_ friendly. They kind of work together after all. Sort of. Not really. But it’s a professional environment and Bucky is trying to keep it that way despite his own occasionally impure thoughts. “And the charge nurse is going to go on a rampant murder spree without her peppermint mocha, so.” 

Clint snorts, but he dutifully reaches for a cup and the peppermint mocha syrup. “You having another praline latte?” he asks, as he starts pumping the white chocolate concoction into the bottom of the drink. 

“Nah,” Bucky says, glancing over the menu, “I don’t wanna go into caffeine overload. How’s that hibiscus refresher thing?”

“It’s got coconut water,” Clint grunts, working the espresso machine. “You won’t like it. The strawberry one’s good though.”

“Gimme that,” Bucky decides, then wonders when he’d mentioned his dislike of coconut anything to Clint. 

Less than a minute later, Bucky’s got a hot peppermint mocha for Pepper, a cold strawberry something or other for himself, and he’s somehow managed to get both of them at the cost of plain drip coffees, though he can’t say exactly how that’d happened. Clint had distracted him with a story about his Friendsgiving celebration with Nat and something about how his dog - Lucky, the dog’s name is Lucky, and Bucky can’t remember when Clint told him that either - had stolen half the turkey off the table, and Bucky had been laughing instead of paying attention to the fact that both drinks had only cost two dollars. 

He’s sipping the strawberry drink which is surprisingly good and not too sweet when he notices the writing on the side of the cup. 

_Nice Mug_

The drink isn’t even in a mug. It’s not even _coffee_. 

And alright, okay, maybe Steve is right about the hot barista that Bucky volunteers to go on coffee runs to see, but Bucky doesn’t have to _admit_ it. He just has to drink the entire drink before he gets back to the unit and throw the cup away before Steve sees it, because it will just add an infinite amount of fuel to the fire. 

It doesn’t matter anyway. Steve still gives him shit when he gets back to the unit because he’s sitting in the charge office with Pepper when Bucky drops her coffee off, so Steve knows Bucky’s voluntarily made a second coffee run before lunch. 

“Nothing for you?” Steve teases, then gives Bucky a shrewd look. “Or did you drink it on the way back to hide the evidence?”

Bucky rolls his eyes, but he also knows he hasn’t fooled Steve for a second.

Sure enough, Steve continues. “What did the cup say this time, Buck?” he asks, and Bucky turns on his heel and stalks out of the office, Steve’s laughter following him down the hall. 

**

At 1:00, Scott comes to find Bucky to tell him the holiday spread is set out in the breakroom. Nothing is open on Christmas - well, the hospital cafeteria is but it’s bare bones as far as selection - and every year the unit collectively agrees to have a potluck. It’s nothing like having a home-cooked holiday meal would be, but it’s nice. Everyone brings something and the hodgepodge is almost endearing. There’s everything from tamales to eggrolls, though Bucky himself has brought his Ma’s mashed potatoes because they’re easy enough to do the night before and he can keep them warm in a crockpot. 

He’s loading a plate up with everything he can squeeze onto it when Steve appears at his elbow with two plates pinched between his fingers and equally full. 

“What do you think your barista is doing for lunch?” he says, all faux-casual, like there’s no ulterior motive to the question at all. 

Bucky sighs. “He’s not _my_ barista,” Bucky tells him, dropping two more eggrolls on top of the amazing-smelling noodle thing. “And I have no idea.”

Steve hums in response, propping empty plates on top of his two full ones and tucking a couple of sodas under his arm. “You wanna go eat downstairs?” he asks. Bucky opens his mouth to say no, but when he turns to look around the break room he realizes it’s packed to the gills with food and people, and quickly decides that Steve probably has the right idea. There are several spaces off the unit with tables - that also have windows and actual daylight - where they can take their plates and eat somewhat peacefully. 

Bucky should have seen it coming when Steve instead leads them to the large, open space directly beside Clint’s coffee kiosk. 

To be fair, it is a really nice area to eat. It’s lit by large skylights and has a fountain in the middle, and because it’s Christmas there’s a large tree and fairy lights and a load of decorations, though the usual piano player must have the day off because no one is playing Christmas tunes in the background. 

“You’re a dick,” Bucky informs Steve as he settles himself at the table Steve chose, perfectly in line of sight of Clint who is wiping the espresso machine down and clearly getting ready to close up for the day. The coffee kiosk is usually open until 6, but there is a large sign saying that they are closing at 2:00 due to the holiday, and it’s ten minutes til that with not a customer in sight.

“You love me.” Steve reminds him as he passes over the Dr. Pepper he’d clearly picked up just for Bucky, considering he hates them. The worst part is that Bucky really does love him, the bastard. 

Steve is barely settled, though, when his phone rings. 

“Don’t answer it,” Bucky tells him, “you’re on lunch.” They’re supposed to hand off their patients and their phones when they go on lunch, but almost no one does, Bucky included. He often ignores the phone if he’s on lunch though, which Steve never does.

“Yeah but it might be important,” Steve argues, pulling it out of his pocket.

“You handed your patients off to someone else!”

Steve gives him a look and Bucky sighs, because yeah, Steve knows him well enough to know Bucky does the same thing.

“ICU, this is Steve.”

Bucky can’t hear the other side of the call, but Steve is answering increasingly complex questions about his patient’s history and medications, and eventually he heaves a sigh and says “I’ll be right there, give me five minutes,” before hanging up the phone. 

He hasn’t even got to eat a single bite of his food. 

“You want me to save this for you?” Bucky asks, gesturing with his fork at Steve’s plates. 

“Nah,” Steve says, grimacing as he stands up. “The heart failure team is at the bedside asking seventeen thousand questions they could probably find in the chart, I think it’s going to take a while. I’ll just make another plate later, there’s plenty of food. You can have it.”

Bucky’s eyebrows rise into his hairline. “You think I’m gonna eat _three plates_ of food?”

Steve shrugs. “Give it to someone in need then,” he says, squishing his face up in a horrible abomination of what is his typical attempt at a wink, and then walks away. He pauses briefly at the coffee kiosk to say something to Clint, who lights up like, well, Christmas. Steve slaps him on the shoulder as he heads towards the elevators, and Clint turns towards Bucky’s table with a grin. 

“Hey, you want one more drink before I shut this baby down?”

Shrugging, Bucky manfully swallows the mouthful of food he’d shoved in his face in an effort not to yell at Steve from across the room. “Sure,” he manages, after a few seconds. “Surprise me.”

Clint turns back to the espresso machine and the familiar sounds of beans grinding and milk frothing drifts across the space to where Bucky is sat, fretting. He picks at the food on his plate and _knows_ without a shred of doubt that Steve had said _something_ to Clint about his ill-advised little crush, and he highly suspects that Steve has set this whole thing up, from the overfilled breakroom to the trip downstairs. It is far too convenient for anything else to be happening here. 

Before Bucky can get too worked up over it, though, Clint appears at the side of the table with two drinks in hand, and when Bucky looks up he can see that the kiosk is now marked _CLOSED_ and the dust protector is over the machine. 

“So,” Clint says, as he sits down and pushes a cup across the table to Bucky, “got any plans for New Year’s? Are you working?”

Bucky sits the cup aside, because he can’t eat a plate - several plates! - worth of food while drinking a hot drink, and the coffee can be his reward for later. He’s sure it’s something he’ll enjoy, because Clint knows him well enough, knows his _coffee tastes_ well enough by now that he wouldn’t give Bucky something he won’t like. 

“No,” Bucky tells him. “I’m working Christmas so I’m off New Year. Next year it’ll be the opposite, that’s how we do holidays. What about you?”

Clint’s fiddling with the sleeve on his coffee cup, like he’s nervous, which is something Bucky’s never seen from him before. “I’m off,” he says, and then hesitates like he was going to say something but changed his mind. “There’s uh…” he trails off.

Bucky sits in silence for what feels like an eternity but is probably only about a minute, before he shoves the still-covered plate towards Clint. “Are you hungry?” he says idiotically. “We do a potluck on the unit every year and there’s a ton of food so-”

“You brought me lunch?” Clint asks, looking delighted, and Bucky doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it’s really _Steve’s_ lunch, and also, he’s not entirely sure anymore that’s even the case. Steve could have taken the food with him, and he certainly hadn’t had to stop and tell Clint that Bucky was eating lunch alone - and it wasn’t like they’d even eaten lunch here before. 

“Sure,” Bucky tells him. “You gave me discounted drinks earlier,” he adds, like that’ll make this all somehow make sense. 

Clint digs into the plate enthusiastically, equilibrium apparently restored by the appearance of food, and his ease is enough that Bucky’s able to relax a bit too. They’ve never done this before - all their interactions have been over a counter, even the one where Clint had given him the little gift from Budapest. They’ve never sat at a table and had a meal and a conversation, and it’s a little weird but it’s mostly like a natural progression. It doesn’t feel nearly as strange as Bucky thinks it probably should.

When Bucky’s plate is empty Clint is still eating, but that’s not that unusual. Bucky had started first, after all, and like most of the nurses he knows he eats like someone is going to snatch the food from in front of him at any moment; he’s so used to eating quickly in case there’s an emergency. 

“So are you doing anything for New Year’s Eve?” he asks Clint, because that’s where he’d left off earlier, and Bucky can’t think of anything _else_ to get the conversational ball rolling. He doesn’t expect Clint to freeze with his fork halfway to his mouth. 

“Uh,” Clint says, like Bucky’s asked him the meaning of the universe and stumped him. “I uh, well-” He swallows roughly and puts the fork back down. “I was- there’s this party?”

“Okay,” Bucky says, cautious. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me your plans if you don’t want to. I was just making conversation.”

“No! No, it’s not that. I um- actually- So there’s this party, uh, Nat is throwing? It’s like a, I mean obviously it’s a New Year’s party, but it’s got a theme, and anyway I was gonna ask if maybe you would wanna go with me?” He cringes, like he expects Bucky to… what? Get mad? 

Mostly, though, Bucky is just confused.

“You want me to go to a New Year’s party with you?” he asks, because he’s not sure if he heard it correctly, what with all the stuttering pauses and the way Clint just blurted the end out as fast as he could manage. 

“Yeah,” Clint says, pointedly staring at his food rather than looking at Bucky at all. “If you wanna.”

Bucky thinks about all the coffees with the flirty puns and how, before that, Clint had put cute names on the cups until Bucky had finally told him it wasn’t a ‘real’ Starbucks and Clint didn’t have to do that name thing. He thinks about how Clint always knows his order and never complains or looks annoyed when Bucky needs six other coffees and how he laughs at Bucky’s admittedly terrible jokes and flirts with him and asks about his day. 

And how, even though he’s always polite and friendly, he’s never seen Clint do any of those things with anybody else,. 

He thinks about how Steve has teased him about Clint for ages, and how Steve wouldn’t do that if he didn’t think Bucky really liked the guy at least a little bit. Steve’s not been wrong about Bucky very often, if ever. 

“Steve said you, uh, you might. If I asked,” Clint adds, a little quieter, now more picking at the remaining food on his plate than eating it with his previous gusto. 

“Sure,” Bucky decides, because he’s been admittedly admiring Clint from afar and less than afar for a while now. An embarrassingly long time, if he were to sit and calculate it, which he isn’t gonna do. And there’s no real reason why he _shouldn’t_ go. They don’t work together, not really. Clint makes coffee and sometimes Bucky buys it, but otherwise their paths don’t cross. 

And Clint is kind and funny and so smoking hot that Bucky’s literally dreamed about him - not that he’s gonna mention that - so there’s literally no reason for him to say no and several good reasons he should say yes. So he does. 

Clint looks up, surprise written all over his face, which quickly brightens into an eye-crinkling smile that Bucky can’t help but smile back at. 

Unfortunately, before he can say anything else, his work phone rings. Bucky groans, but picks it up to answer. Wedging it between his ear and shoulder to listen, he pulls a black marker out of his pocket and scribbles his number across a napkin. His lunch break is nearly over anyway, and from the sounds of things he’s going to have to head back up to the unit and start setting up for a Lifeflight patient that’s coming in for emergency surgery. 

_Call me_ he writes on the napkin, and underlines it twice for emphasis. He passes the napkin to Clint, who makes a show out of folding it up and tucking it into the pocket of his polo shirt. Before Bucky can put the marker away, though, Clint motions for it, and Bucky hands it over. He takes Bucky’s drink, too, and draws lines through whatever he’d already written there, then scribbles something below it - something Bucky hopes is his number. 

“Gotta go,” Bucky mouths at him, waggling the phone as he stands and starts gathering his trash. Clint waves him off though, pulling Steve’s second uneaten plate towards himself like Bucky’s going to steal it, and then he stacks the remaining trash up to carry to the garbage can nearby. He shoos Bucky off, which makes him snort a little laugh that he hopes the person on the other end of the line can’t hear. Bucky waves, walking backwards for a second while he waits for Clint to wave back. 

When he gets back to the unit, there’s a flurry of activity as they set the room up for admission and Bucky receives report from the other hospital, but eventually it settles. Finally Bucky’s able to sit down at the nurses’ station with his now-lukewarm drink and slide the heat sleeve off of the cup so he can see the writing. 

_C’mon and CHAI new things_ is crossed out in thick black marker, but it makes Bucky snort because it at least tells him the drink is probably a chai latte, which is one of the few things Bucky will drink late in the day because it’s less likely to keep him awake. It makes Bucky’s stomach twist up a little in butterflies that Clint knows that. Below that, though, is a barely-legible phone number and the words _Better LATTE than never_ , with a little heart at the end. There’s also a text waiting for him on his phone, time stamped like Clint texted him in the time it took Bucky to walk to the elevator, with his name and the details for the party and a _‘can’t wait to see you’_. 

Bucky’s really looking forward to what the new year is going to bring. 

**

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much to Nny for giving this a very excellent and speedy beta read. It’s so much better for your input, as always <3 All mistakes are still my own.


End file.
